A hyper-converged infrastructure is a rack-based system with a combination of compute, storage and networking components. Each rack includes multiple bare metal systems (e.g., nodes) with compute, storage and networking capabilities. The term “bare metal” refers to a computer system without an operating system (OS) installed. The bare metal systems are connected to a Top of the Rack (TOR) switch to access an external network. The number of bare metal systems in the rack can vary based on capacity requirements, which may change dynamically over time.
Existing hyper-converged infrastructures provision the bare metal systems by manually provisioning one of the bare metal systems. This bare metal system becomes a control node and is used to provision other bare metal systems in the rack. If the control node is removed from the rack, one of the other bare metal systems needs to be established as the control node. If all of the bare metal systems are replaced in the rack, the process must be restarted. Restarting the process in this way is a very time-consuming process. A more robust method, which does not depend on any individual bare metal system for provisioning the hyper-converged infrastructure bare metal systems, is needed.